The world’s richest man and its most powerful leader channel their inner middle schooler in a breakup for the ages.

By Susan B. Glasser

Shamelessness, defined as brazen disregard for that which might deter anyone else, has always been one of Donald Trump’s superpowers. It’s part of the alchemy by which he can ignore his own defeats, reverses, missteps, and absurd overpromises, and pretend that they either never happened or were actually proof of great success. On Wednesday, the President faced a barrage of ominous developments that might have fazed another leader—a worrisome jobs report, losses in federal court related to four of his signature policies, an increasingly vituperative public breakup with Elon Musk. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office determined that Trump’s marquee legislative effort, the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” would add an estimated $2.4 trillion to the U.S. budget deficit over the next decade—a conclusion that only fuelled Musk’s recent attacks on it. Musk, who first broke with Trump last week over the measure, has, in recent days, urged members of Congress to “KILL the BILL,” calling it a “disgusting abomination.” So what did Trump do in response? Escalate, of course. On Wednesday evening, he announced three of his most controversial executive orders yet—barring new international Harvard students from entering the country, ordering an investigation into a crazy conspiracy theory that Joe Biden’s aides usurped the President’s powers to issue decrees by autopen, and banning citizens from twelve countries, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, from travelling to the U.S. The day, as with so many already in Trump’s second term, was a news anchor’s nightmare.

Amid so many headlines, you might have missed that Trump also spent an hour and fifteen minutes on Wednesday on the phone with Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, in a call that went so poorly that Trump’s subsequent account of it included two startling disclosures: first, “immediate peace” between Russia and Ukraine was not going to happen, and, second, Putin stated “very strongly” that Russia will retaliate in response to Kyiv’s daring surprise attack earlier this week on its strategic bomber fleet. Trump’s post about the call appeared on his Truth Social network at 1:56 P.M. on June 4th, and perhaps history will record that as the moment when one of Trump’s most flagrantly impossible campaign promises finally flamed out—his pledge, oft repeated, to instantly end the war in Ukraine.

Technically, Trump had long since failed to deliver on this one, given that he had insisted throughout the 2024 campaign that it would take him less than twenty-four hours to stop the fighting. (CNN compiled a non-exhaustive guide to fifty-three times he made this pledge, including saying that he would have the war “settled” even before he returned to the White House.) Until recently, Trump still claimed to be pursuing this goal, and while he admitted the obvious to Time that his self-imposed deadline was an “exaggeration” just “to make a point,” he nonetheless insisted that peace would soon be forthcoming. On April 25th, he even announced that the two warring parties were “very close to a deal” and that “SUCCESS seems to be in the future!” A week ago, Trump said that he needed just two more weeks to see what was possible with Putin. But on Wednesday came the classic Trump walk-back, never acknowledged as such but a walk-back just the same: he’d had a “good conversation” with Putin, according to his post, but not one that was going anywhere with regards to Ukraine. Back in February, Trump demanded an immediate ceasefire in the conflict; by Thursday, in a meeting with Friedrich Merz, the new Chancellor of Germany, Trump was offering only a noncommittal “Maybe it will end.”

At this point, Trump is unlikely to expend much more energy on failed peacemaking, and it seems clear he’s already proceeding with his real goal of normalizing relations with Russia, even without a halt to the fighting. He tipped his hand in his Wednesday Truth Social post, which quickly pivoted from the bad news about Ukraine to asking for Putin’s assistance in securing Trump’s faltering effort to secure a nuclear deal with Iran. Talk about a climbdown: Instead of treating Putin as a global pariah who launched an unprovoked invasion of his neighbor and regularly brandishes Russia’s nuclear arsenal as a form of geopolitical blackmail, Trump is now honoring the Russian President as an international statesman whose diplomatic prowess can be enlisted in the cause of nuclear nonproliferation.

Another of Trump’s most flamboyantly disregarded promises is at the heart of his rapidly escalating feud with Musk. In the past, Trump has pledged to begin to “pay down” the U.S. national debt, and during the campaign Musk, whom he brought in to oversee the effort, promised to make as much as two trillion dollars in annual budget cuts, which, if actually enacted and extrapolated over ten years, would in theory yield some twenty trillion dollars in savings. Not only did Musk not achieve anything like that during his brief, divisive tenure as head of a new Department of Government Efficiency but Trump’s new megabill making its way through the Republican-controlled Congress could add trillions more to the deficit. The President often relies on his supporters to swallow his gigantic flip-flops, but, even by Trump’s standards, this one’s impressive—a swing of more than twenty-two trillion dollars in the wrong direction from what he promised to what he’s actually doing.

Maybe Trump thought that Musk was just another always-Trumper, one of those zealous converts who will happily let their leader get away with any ideological contortion, no matter how cynical. (See: Vance, J. D.) Musk was certainly behaving like a moonstruck cultist. “I love @realdonaldtrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” he tweeted in February, during the height of their bromance.

But by Thursday the public break between the President and his biggest financial benefactor, which began with Musk’s sore words about Trump’s deficit-busting policies, had taken the personal turn we all knew was coming. It began during Trump’s photo op with Merz, when Trump said that he was “very disappointed” in Musk, who responded in real time on X by calling out Trump for his “ingratitude.” Responding to a video clip in which Trump claimed that he would have won last year’s election without Musk’s infusion of money, Musk wrote, “Without me, Trump would have lost the election.” Soon, Musk recirculated a meme on X of Trump as a shameless liar. It shows Trump telling an interviewer, “I have a plan to cut spending,” then brandishing a piece of paper on which he’s written the plan, which turns out to be “Increase spending.”

It didn’t take long before the two were in an all-out public war with each other, and it wasn’t just about fiscal planning. In a spat that showed just how much the world’s richest man and its most powerful politician resemble angry middle schoolers, Trump took to his social-media platform to announce that, in fact, Musk had been “wearing thin” and Trump had “asked him to leave.” Rather than a fight on principle about spending, Trump claimed, Musk “just went CRAZY” when Trump insisted on getting rid of the electric-vehicle government subsidies that help Musk’s Tesla car company. (“An obvious lie,” Musk soon replied. “So sad.”)

Trump posted that at 2:37 P.M. And he followed it with an even more explosive threat: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.” The post underscored—if it needed underscoring—that this is a battle between two hypocrites: the billionaire who claims to loathe government spending, unless it’s on his behalf, versus the President who is willing to abandon people and principles as quickly as he adopts them.

By 3:10 P.M., Musk was ready for the day’s “really big bomb,” as he put it, a claim about another one of Trump’s broken promises: the pledge Trump had made to reveal declassified files from the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, which presumably include details about Epstein’s rich and powerful friends. Trump “is in the Epstein files,” Musk wrote. “That is the real reason they have not been made public.”

And with that the internet exploded. The messy public divorce that seemed inevitable last week has fulfilled its tabloid promise. Meanwhile, Wednesday might have been a year ago. Vladimir who?

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